Thomas Eakins

Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) was the most powerful figure painter and portrait painter of his time in America. He was a leading naturalist and one of the era's strongest painters of the current scene.

Thomas Eakins was born on July 25, 1844, in Philadelphia. After his graduation from Central High School, he studied for 5 years at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he drew chiefly from casts. To make up for his lack of study of living models, he entered Jefferson Medical College and took the regular courses in anatomy, including dissecting cadavers and observing operations.

In 1866 Eakins left for Paris, where he went through 3 years of rigorous academic training at the École des Beaux-Arts under Jean Léon Gérôme. He also traveled in Italy and Germany. In December 1869 he went to Spain, In Madrid's Prado Museum his discovery of 17th-century Spanish painting, especially the work of Diego Velázquez and Jusepe de Ribera, came as a revelation after the insipidity of the French Salons. After a winter in Seville, Eakins went back to Paris. In July 1870 he returned to Philadelphia, where he would live for the rest of his life, never going abroad again.

The Realist

Eakins now took for subjects the life of his place and period, Philadelphia of the 1870s; and with uncompromising realism he built his art out of this. His first American paintings were scenes of outdoor life in and around the city—rowing on the Schuylkill River, sailing and fishing on the Delaware River, hunting in the New Jersey marshes— and domestic genre picturing his family and friends in their homes. These works revealed utter honesty, a sure grasp of character, and an unsentimental but deep emotional attachment to his community and its people. From the first, they had the strong construction, the sense of form and of three-dimensional design, and the complete clarity of vision that were to mark Eakins's style thenceforth. The most important work of this period was the Gross Clinic (1875), portraying the great surgeon Samuel D. Gross operating before his students in Jefferson Medical College. The painting shocked the public and critics but established Eakins's reputation as a leader of American naturalism.

Scientific Interests

Eakins had an unusual combination of artistic and scientific gifts. Anatomy, higher mathematics, and the science of perspective were major interests to him and played an essential part in his painting. As early as 1880, he was using photography as an aid to painting, as a means of studying the body and its actions, and as an independent form of pictorial expression. In 1884 he collaborated with the pioneer photographer Eadweard Muybridge in photographing the motion of men and animals, but Eakins improved on Muybridge's method of employing a battery of cameras by using a single camera.

Another of Eakins's interests was sculpture. Sometimes he made small models for figures in his paintings, and he produced several full-scale anatomical casts. In the 1880s and early 1890s he executed eight original pieces. All of them were in relief, some in very high relief, almost in the round. Although he did not try to make sculpture his major medium, the strength and skill of his few pieces indicate that he might have achieved results as substantial as in painting.

The Teacher

A natural teacher, in 1876 Eakins began instructing at the Pennsylvania Academy and in 1879 became acting head of the school. Discarding old-fashioned methods, he subordinated drawing from casts to painting from the model, and based instruction on thorough study of the human body, including anatomy courses and dissection— innovations that were to revolutionize art education in America. But his stubborn insistence on the nude, particularly the completely nude male model in lectures on anatomy, scandalized the academy trustees and the more proper women students, and he was forced to resign in 1886. Most of his men students seceded from the academy and started the Art Students' League of Philadelphia, which continued for about 7 years, with Eakins as its unpaid head.

Until his early 40s Eakins had painted varied aspects of contemporary life, outdoors and indoors, as well as many portraits. But the academy affair and the lack of popular success for his paintings (at 36 he had sold only nine pictures for a total of a little over $2,000) probably explain why in the middle 1880s he abandoned his picturing of the broader American scene, except occasionally, and concentrated on portraiture.

His Portraiture

In this more restricted field Eakins displayed growing mastery. Those who sat for his portraits were not the wealthy and fashionable, but his friends and students and individuals who attracted him by their qualities of mind—scientists, physicians, fellow artists, musicians, the Catholic clergy. They were pictured without a trace of flattery but with a profound sense of their identity as individuals. Eakin's sure grasp of character, his thorough knowledge of the human body, and his psychological penetration gave his portraits intense vitality. His paintings of women, in contrast to the bodiless idealism of his academic contemporaries, had a flesh-and-blood reality and sense of sex. Eakin's portraiture forms the most mature pictorial record of the American people of his time, equal to John Singleton Copley's record of colonial Americans.

But none of these qualities made for worldly success. Commissions were rare. Usually Eakins asked sitters to pose, then gave them the paintings. Even so, his sitters often did not bother to take their portraits, so that he was left with a studio full of them. After the 1880s he suffered increasing neglect from the academic art world—or actual opposition, as when they refused to exhibit the masterpiece of his mature years, the Agnew Clinic (1889). In spite of this lack of recognition, he continued to work in the same uncompromisingly realistic style, and some of his strongest works were painted during the 1900s. Finally, in old age, he received a small shower of honors.

In 1884 Eakins had married Susan Hannah Macdowell, a former pupil and a gifted painter. They had no children but many students and friends. Fortunately he had a modest income from his father, and they lived in the family home, where he had lived since childhood. It was there that he died on June 25, 1916.

Eakins's work had a vitality, substance, and sculptural form greater than that of any other American painter of his generation. His figure compositions, particularly the relatively few based on the nude or seminude figure, achieved plastic design of a high order. The prudish limitations of his environment, combined with his own intransigent realism, thwarted full expression of his healthy sensuousness and his potentialities in design. But with all these reservations, Eakins's art was a monumental achievement. He was the first major painter of his period to accept completely the realities of contemporary American life and to create out of them a strong and profound art.

Further Reading

The first monograph on Eakins is Lloyd Goodrich, Thomas Eakins: His Life and Work (1933). Margaret McHenry, Thomas Eakins Who Painted (1946), adds personal material about the artist and his sitters and friends. Roland McKinney, Thomas Eakins (1942), and Fairfield Porter, Thomas Eakins (1959), are shorter biographical and critical accounts, with numerous illustrations. Sylvan Schendler, Eakins (1967), is a full-length study of Eakins and his art in relation to American society and culture of his period and includes 158 illustrations.

Additional Sources

Goodrich, Lloyd, Thomas Eakins, Cambridge, Mass.: Published for the National Gallery of Art by Harvard University Press, 1982.

Hendricks, Gordon, The life and work of Thomas Eakins, New York: Grossman Publishers, 1974.

Homer, William Innes, Thomas Eakins: his life and art, New York: Abbeville Press, 1992. □

Thomas Eakins , 1844–1916, American painter, photographer, and sculptor, b. Philadelphia, where he worked most of his life. Eakins is considered the foremost American portrait painter and one of the greatest artists of the 19th cent.

Early Career

Eakins studied art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and anatomy at Jefferson Medical College (now Thomas Jefferson Univ.). In Paris from 1866 until 1870, he studied with Gérôme and Bonnat and with the sculptor A. A. Dumont. He visited Spain, where he was drawn to the works of Velázquez. From 1870 he taught at the Pennsylvania Academy, where he was harshly criticized for his teaching innovations: he insisted on working from live, nude models, on learning anatomy from dissection, on learning motion by watching athletes perform, and on working in oils. His refusal to abandon the use of nude models forced his resignation in 1886.

Approach and Influence

Eakins sought, above all, to describe honestly the reality of what he saw, attempting to "peer deeper into the heart of American life." He felt that no formula of ideal beauty could compare with what is real and refused the temptation to see what, according to fashion, he ought to. His portraits were not flattering; they were penetrating and often disappointed his sitters. His painstaking study of anatomy and geometric perspective served his ambition to grasp and define exterior reality in paint, while his remarkable honesty of approach provided him a view of the interior realities of human character. His perception and mode of illumination of the human face are frequently likened to those of Rembrandt.

In a period when many artists were concerned with the exotic or deliberately picturesque, Eakins succeeded in recording the everyday world about him with insight and profound humanity. Eakins revived the art of portraiture in the United States and, through his influence as a teacher, founded a native school of American art, visible in the works of his pupils Henri, Sloan, Glackens, and Sterne, and more recently in the work of new generations of realist painters.

Photography and Sculpture

From the 1880s on Eakins used photography in many ways. He employed it as an art in its own right, which he used to make powerful studies of family and friends, animals and rural scenes. He used it as an aid to accuracy in painting for himself and his classes, either as an inspiration for a related work or by copying directly (until about 1886 he sometimes secretly traced images onto canvas from projected photographs, a technique that was not confirmed until the early 21st cent.). He also made use of photography to study motion, devising for Eadweard Muybridge a camera which, by means of a revolving disk over the lens, could make several exposures on a single plate, and thereby aid in understanding movement in human beings and in animals, in everyday and athletic motion. He also adapted Muybridge's animal studies for use in a zoetrope, a precursor of the motion picture projector. Eakins's few works in sculpture include the horses on the Soldiers' and Sailors' Memorial Arch, Brooklyn, N.Y.

Notable Works

Only toward the very end of his life was Eakins recognized as a major painter. Among his most notable works are The Surgical Clinic of Professor Gross (1875; Philadelphia Mus. and Pennsylvania Acad., Philadelphia), the realism of which caused a scandal when it was finished; The Clinic of Professor Agnew (1889; Univ. of Pennsylvania); The Concert Singer (1892; Pennsylvania Acad.); The Chess Players (1876) and The Thinker (1900; both: Metropolitan Mus.); and the portraits of Mrs. Frishmuth (1900; Philadelphia Mus.) and Miss Van Buren (1891; Phillips Coll., Washington, D.C.). His pictures of athletes, such as Swimming (also called The Swimming Hole, 1885; Amon Carter Mus., Fort Worth, Tex.), Salutat (1898; Addison Gall., Andover, Mass.), and Max Schmitt in a Single Scull (1871; Metropolitan Mus.), are especially fine.

Bibliography

See illustrated catalogs of his watercolors by D. F. Hoopes (1971, repr. 1988) and his photographs by G. Hendricks (1972); biographies by L. Goodrich (1933, repr. 1977), W. I. Homer (2002), H. Adams (2005), S. D. Kirkpatrick (2006), and W. S. McFeely (2006); studies by F. Porter (1959), S. Schindler (1967), G. Hendricks (1974), E. Johns (1983, repr. 1991), J. Wilmerding, ed. (1993), H. A. Cooper (1996), K. A. Foster (1998), M. A. Berger (2000), and D. Sewell, ed. (2001); study of his photographs by S. Danly and C. Leibold (1994).

Eakins, Thomas (b Philadelphia, 25 July 1844; d Philadelphia, 25 June 1916). American painter, primarily of portraits, regarded by most critics as the outstanding American painter of the 19th century and by many as the greatest his country has yet produced. He spent almost all his career in Philadelphia, where he studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1862–6. This was followed by his only substantial period away from his native city, when he spent four years in Europe, 1866–70. In Paris he continued his training under Gérôme, 1866–9, but he learnt more from a six-month visit to Spain at the end of his stay in Europe, the unaffected naturalism and sombre dignity of Velázquez's work making a particularly strong impact on him. In 1870 he returned to Philadelphia and in 1876 he began teaching at the Pennsylvania Academy. He caused controversy with his radical ideas, particularly his insistence on basing study on nude models rather than plaster casts, and in 1886 he was forced to resign after allowing a mixed-sex class to draw from a completely nude male model. Such desire for realism also led Eakins to study anatomy and to make use of Muybridge's photographic researches, but the scientific bent in his work is of less importance than his honesty and depth of characterization; his portraits are often compared with Rembrandt's because of their dramatic play of sombre lighting and sense of inner truth.

Eakins's most famous work is The Gross Clinic (1875, Thomas Jefferson Univ., Philadelphia), which has been described as ‘very possibly the greatest picture ever painted by an American artist’ ( John Wilmerding, American Art, 1976). It depicts a famous Philadelphia surgeon, Dr Samuel Gross, presiding over an operation watched by a class of students. Eakins painted it for a major exhibition in Philadelphia celebrating the centenary of the Declaration of Independence, but it was rejected by the art jury because of its gory realism and instead was displayed in the medical section of the exhibition. He later suffered a similar rejection with another picture of surgery, The Agnew Clinic (1889, Univ. of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia). Because he had a small private income and modest needs, Eakins could continue on his chosen course despite public condemnation, but much of his later career was spent working in bitter isolation; in 1894 he wrote, ‘My honours are misunderstanding, persecution, and neglect, enhanced because unsought.’ It was only near the end of his life that he achieved recognition as a great master, and in the first two decades of the 20th century his desire to ‘peer deeper into the heart of American life’ was reflected in the work of the Ashcan School and other realist painters. In 1917 a memorial exhibition of his work was held at the Metropolitan Museum, New York, and Robert Henri—one of Eakins's greatest admirers—wrote an open letter to his students at the Art Students League, urging them to study the work of the great man: ‘His quality was honesty. “Integrity” is the word which seems best to fit him. Personally I consider him the greatest portrait painter America has produced.’

In addition to portraits, Eakins painted memorable genre scenes of Philadelphia life; boating and rowing were favourite themes, reflecting his love of outdoor exercise (Max Schmitt in a Single Scull, 1871, Met. Mus., New York). He also took photographs and made a few sculptures. His wife Susan Hannah Macdowell Eakins (1851–1938), whom he married in 1884, was likewise a painter and photographer, as well as an accomplished pianist.

Eakins, Thomas (1844–1916), painter and portraitist.Thomas Eakins rarely enjoyed critical or popular success during his lifetime, but a 1930 Museum of Modern Art exhibition featuring his work together with that of Winslow Homer and Albert P. Ryder helped establish his reputation as a major American artist precisely because of his status outside cosmopolitan artistic and social circles. Born in Philadelphia, Eakins studied art and anatomy in that city before leaving in 1866 for Jean‐Léon Gérôme's studio at the école des Beaux‐Arts in Paris. He settled in Philadelphia in 1870, where he painted just under three hundred works, mostly of eminent professionals, nearly all without a commission. A scientific model of objective observation underpinned his style. In portraits of rowers like Max Schmitt in a Single Scull (1871), for example, Eakins calculated wave movement and light refraction, drew perspective grids, and sketched rudder positions. William Rush Carving his Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River (1877) emphasized a palpably real and respectable nude female model, underscoring the importance of the body in artistic production, regardless of genteel proprieties. An interest in photography, including assisting in Eadweard Muybridge's 1883 University of Pennsylvania study of human and animal motion, stemmed from the same aim of empirical analysis. His paintings of the nude male body in action, such as Swimming Hole (1883) or Salutat (1898), helped redefine masculinity away from the genteel toward an ideal of muscular physical fitness.

Eakins's commitment to scientific detachment affronted contemporary artistic decorum. The Gross Clinic (1875), a portrait of Dr. Samuel Gross, foregrounded the surgeon's bloodied hands and scalpel. The jury at Philadelphia's 1876 Centennial Exhibition rejected it, though Jefferson Medical College bought it three years later. Eakins returned to the theme in Agnew Clinic (1889). As director of instruction at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Eakins thoroughly revised the curriculum, but in 1886, the directors forced his resignation for using a nude male model in a mixed‐sex drawing class. Eakins's later portraits, such as Amelia Van Buren (1891), increasingly showed tired, aging, or isolated figures, in shadowy light or slumping postures, again underscoring his disdain for artistic or social conventions.
See also Gilded Age; Painting: To 1945.

Bibliography

Elizabeth Johns , Thomas Eakins: The Heroism of Modern Life, 1983.
Kathleen Foster , Thomas Eakins Rediscovered, 1997.

Wendy J. Katz

Eakins, Thomas (1844–1916). American painter, primarily of portraits, active for most of his life in his native city of Philadelphia; he is regarded by most critics as the outstanding American painter of the 19th century and by many as the greatest his country has yet produced. After studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, he moved to Paris and continued his training under Gérôme, 1866–9. However, he learnt more from a six-month visit to Spain, where he particularly admired the precise and uncompromising sense for actuality he found in Velázquez and Ribera. In 1870 he returned to Philadelphia and in 1876 he began teaching there at the Pennsylvania Academy. He was attacked for his radical ideas, particularly his insistence on working from nude models, and in 1886 he was forced to resign after allowing a mixed class to draw from a completely nude male model. Eakins's quest for realism led him to study anatomy and make full use of Muybridge's photographic researches, but the scientific bent in his work is of less importance than his honesty and depth of characterization. His portraits are often compared with Rembrandt's because of their dramatic play of sombre lighting and sense of inner truth. The most famous of his paintings is The Gross Clinic (1875, Thomas Jefferson Univ., Philadelphia), which aroused controversy because of its unsparing depiction of surgery, an experience that was repeated with The Agnew Clinic (1889, Univ. of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia). Because of financial support from his father, Eakins could continue on his chosen course despite public abuse, but much of his later career was spent working in bitter isolation. It was only near the end of his life that he achieved recognition as a great master, and in the first two decades of the 20th century his desire to ‘peer deeper into the heart of American life’ was reflected in the work of the Ashcan School and other realist painters; Robert Henri was one of his greatest admirers. In addition to portraits, Eakins painted genre scenes of Philadelphia life (boating and bathing were favourite themes), and he also took photographs and made a few sculptures. His wife, Susan Hannah Macdowell Eakins (1851–1938), whom he married in 1884, was likewise a painter and photographer, as well as an accomplished pianist.

Eakins, Thomas (1844–1916). American painter, mainly of portraits, active for most of his life in his native Philadelphia. He began teaching at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts there in 1876 and was attacked for his radical ideas, particularly his insistence on working from nude models. In 1886 he was forced to resign after allowing a mixed class to draw from a completely nude male model, but his ideals were carried on by his successor Anshutz. Eakins also caused controversy more than once because of the unsparing realism of his work. Financial support from his father enabled him to continue on his chosen course despite public abuse, but much of his later career was spent working in bitter isolation. In 1894 he wrote: ‘My honours are misunderstanding, persecution, and neglect, enhanced because unsought.’ It was only near the end of his life that he achieved recognition as a great master, and in the first two decades of the 20th century his desire to ‘peer deeper into the heart of American life’ was reflected in the work of the Ashcan School and other realist painters. In 1917 a memorial exhibition of his work was held at the Metropolitan Museum, New York, and Robert Henri—one of Eakins's greatest admirers—wrote an open letter to his students at the Art Students League, urging them to study the work of the great man: ‘His quality was honesty. “Integrity” is the word which seems best to fit him. Personally I consider him the greatest portrait painter America has produced.’ This verdict is now shared by most critics; indeed, many consider him the greatest of all American painters. Eakins also made a few sculptures. Little of his work can be seen outside the USA; the best collection is in the Philadelphia Museum.

His wife, Susan Hannah Macdowell Eakins (1851–1938), whom he married in 1884, was also a painter and photographer, as well as an accomplished pianist.

Eakins, Thomas (1844–1916) US painter and photographer, regarded as one of the greatest artists of the 19th century. Eakin's painstaking search for anatomical accuracy aroused much controversy. His most celebrated paintings are Gross Clinic (1875), The Chess Players (1876), The Swimming Hole (1883), and Agnew Clinic (1889). He had a profound impact on the Ashcan school. See also luminism